Samsung Releases the Latest Galaxy Phone

Samsung couldn't get the Rockettes for the launch of the Samsung S4 tonight, but they did get Radio City Music Hall (and some promo dancers who erupted from a box in Times Square earlier this week). Not to be outdone by the concert hall's chrome and leather art deco ornamentation, Samsung dolled up its near-behemoth of a plastic phone—now with a 5-inch screen—with "features inspired by the people of the world."

The big screen isn't only big—it's sharp. The AMOLED screen, a first in cellphones, holds 441 ppi. The back of the phone, per usual, is "a polycarbonate case" (i.e. plastic). Within is a 2600 removable mAh battery, and a 13 MP camera and a 2 MP front-facing camera; those two can be used simultaneously to insert two scenes in the same video. To hold that file and others, the phone comes in 16, 32, and 64 GB versions and has an SD expansion slot.

The most useful features might be Air Gesture and Smart Scroll/Pause, which let you navigate the screen without actually touching it. Hover your screen over the phone with Air Gesture, and let the phone track your eye movement, using the front-facing camera, with Smart Scrolling and, when you look away, Smart Pausing.

Instead of turning to Google Translate, Samsung hopes you'll use S Translator, its new near-instant translation service that understands nine languages and can process text-to-speech and speech-to-text inputs—even without a network translation (turns out those electronic 1990s dictionaries had something to keep around).

Samsung also managed to steal Blackberry's meek thunder with Samsung Knox, a security feature introduced at Mobile World Congress and debuting on the S4. Like the new Blackberry system, Knox essentially separates the phone into two partitions, one for work and one for fun.

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For that fun, Samsung offers Share Music, which allows you to use up to eight phones to play the same music, without an internet connection. Each phone acts as a different speaker component; one is the right, one is the left, and so on. (A bunch of hen-festy women showed this off in a faux bachelorette get-together—"hanging with the girls"—during which they also went gaga for the calorie- and activity-tracking capabilities.)

The phone runs on Android, and, like its predecessors, has a light Samsung touch. The top black bar that's dragged down to reveal settings, for instance, is no longer black but translucent, giving what directory of product marketing Ryan Bidan calls that "hip, magazine feel." Also as with its predecessors, much of the S4's software prowess lies in camera features. Samsung gave the camera the ability to record so many frames per second that, if someone photobombs your next selfie, you can simply erase him from the picture.

Throughout the night, Samsung took a note from the Oscars, and tilted its hat to both the awfully awkward presentation by Anne Hathaway and James Franco two years ago and Seth MacFarlane's sexism and Jew jokes. In other words, lots of showtunes, little information, and bright lights.

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